Nintendo of America is threatening sites that wrote about College Humor’s Mario and Princess sex tape spoof on the grounds of trademark infringement.

In a letter sent to The Inquisitr from Nintendo representatives Cyveillance, the firm states that they were writing to ask us to “stop using the Nintendo properties in the hidden text/visible text/meta tags and/or title and/or links of the above-referenced sexually explicit Web site.” The firm goes on to state that “Nintendo’s customers include many children and their parents. Unauthorized use of Nintendo trademark(s)/work(s) is harmful to those customers and will tarnish Nintendo’s reputation.”

The video is still up on College Humor, so we can assume that this is an isolated case from agency Cyveillance. If other bloggers have received a similar C&D letter, we would love to hear about it. If Nintendo really insists that everyone removes the funny video, maybe bloggers should boycot serious coverage of Nintendo news.

At the time, I noted the way that more and more information that was once delivered by independent web sites was now being delivered directly by search engines, and that rather than linking out to others, there were strong signs of a trend towards keeping the link flow to themselves.

This thought re-surfaced when Techcrunch launched Crunchbase. Now, rather than linking directly to companies covered in its stories, Techcrunch links to one of its own properties to provide additional information about them. I noticed the same behavior the other day on the New York Times, when I followed a link, and was taken to a search result for articles on the subject at the Times (with lots of ads, even if there were few results).

The good news is a couple of weeks into the 3rd month that our traffic is through the roof. We’d had 2 solid weeks leading to the last couple of days, a couple of 5 figure days in terms of traffic, but the better news was even the quiet days were twice the size they were even a month back. Then there was bigfoot. I’m still waiting on the final stats for the second day of Bigfoot traffic, but it’s likely 2 days of 100k+. I’m also still waiting on the latest RSS sub rates as I post this, but we put on a solid 500+ additional subscribers on the main feed the first day of the surge, and hopefully something close the second day.

For a newish site, I think The Inquisitr is doing just fine… can’t wait to look back on this in a year and see where things stand…

The Huffington Post is moving to launch local news & politics coverage with this recent launch of HuffPost Chicago – according to a post on The Inquisitr:

Huffington Post has gone local with the launch of HuffPost Chicago.

The localization of the site, which was announced by founder Arianna Huffington in June this year during the Future of Journalism event staged by the Guardian newspaper, is a move that shows the company’s direction towards covering all news, not only politics.

Huffington Post is one of the largest blogs on the internet today — their move into local coverage should pose a challenge for some local news coverage in both online and print media.

The site launches with three pages, a front page that offers a summary to some of the best news blogs in the 2.0 space (and the Inquisitr of course, but I’m allowed to put my own link in). The second page offers a summary of the best news in the blogging world, an early passion of mine. The third page is a summary of all the major meme trackers, so users can quickly glance at what’s hot across the web.

The original idea was to do more pages, and in future weeks and months I will roll out more.

The site is inspired, of course, by tools like Popurls – but Duncan’s has a nice look & feel – and the selection of sites is much more inspired than those of his competitor.